emphasis pronoun

luxuryproblem:

rosietint:

myvivavoce:

amandaw:

Trigger warning.

So basically:

High school girl goes to teacher, tells teacher that high school boy raped her. Teacher goes to principal with concerns, offers to escort girl to her transportation home instead of leaving her on school grounds unattended. Principal has a different idea: use this girl as “bait” to try to catch teenagers “having sex” after school. Will have security follow girl around school to catch teenagers gettin’ their hormones on.

Girl is left alone at school,  gets raped again (security: not there to stop it happening! surprise!), principal claims “Oh, well, I never knew the sex was nonconsensual!” but then also claims to be able to disprove that the girl was raped, claims girl “liked” the boy and was jealous of other girls who also were sexually assaulted by the boy, therefore that sex was by definition consented to!

Really, it’s more fucked up than I’ve let on. Read the link if you can. The principal called this a fucking sting operation. His words.

BTW: Upper St. Clair High School has been in the news for fucked-up dealings around girls getting raped there since before I moved here in 2006. I haven’t had a year pass when they were not in the news because girls were coming forward with allegations of sexual assault and school officials being deliberately oblivious and/or actively hostile to them as victims.

This is absolutely horrific. I had to read it twice before I realized that this girl came to school officials reporting a rape, and not only did they use her as “bait”, but that they failed to even operate the “sting” correctly (no security guards around when you’re supposed to be catching someone doing something wrong? no one following her specifically? seriously?), and most, importantly, that they never believed her in the first place. They sent this girl into danger- forced her into danger- without even admitting that she had been raped.

Disgusting.

There’s a lot of evidence that rather than heading towards a post-racial society, racial gaps in the US are actually widening - in wealth, in test scores, and in organ donation. And recent studies have shown that white supremacy extends to whose life is and is not extended by organ donation (80% of which are kidney donations).

Welcome to July’s edition of the Disability Carnival! The theme this month is “evidence”…

Thanks to the folks at Temple University’s Disability Studies (particularly Penny Richards) for letting me host this round. The next carnival will be hosted at brilliantmindbrokenbody and the theme is “distance”.  Thanks for stopping by, folks!

Hatred and fear of women in my once and future positions is a function of (what else?) the kyriarchy. I heard so much bullshit about women and teenaged girls as a teenaged girl that I started to believe it, and hate myself, and think I deserved this abuse. And then when I grew up and got stronger and stopped hating myself, I still believed that I’d deserved what I’d felt because I was a teenaged girl, and believed that teenaged girls deserved ridicule.

one of my favorite posts i’ve written in a while.

luxuryproblem:

and in blatantly racist products today….

Vaseline has introduced a skin-lightening Facebook application designed to allow users to lighten their skin color in the profile pictures displayed on the social network site.

(Credit: Vaseline)

The company has chosen Bollywood star Shahid Kapur to promote the application as well as its other skin-lightening creams for men. In the widget promising to “Transform Your Face On Facebook With Vaseline Men,” Kapur’s face is presented divided into dark and fair halves.

“We started campaign advertising (for the application) from the second week of June and the response has been pretty phenomenal,” Pankaj Parihar from global advertising firm Omnicom, which designed the campaign, said in an interview with the Australian web site Adelaide Now.

Skin-whitening creams for men and women have proved popular in India. Still, foreign companies have been criticized in the local media for playing up a perceived preference for lighter skin color.

Last year a column in the Times of India, lampooned the introduction of “Healthy White Skin Lightening Body Milk” by Vaseline as designed to ensure “an Aryan glow from head to toes.”

At the time, the piece noted that the billboard advertising included the following pitch:

When it’s healthy and cared for, our skin has the natural ability to maintain a light tone and clear texture. Unfortunately, when it’s exposed to the sun, the skin’s natural lightening processes are interrupted. Pigment producing cells become increasingly active, tanning the skin, and leaving it several shades darker than it’s supposed to be.

New, Vaseline Healthy White skin lightening body milk works with the skin to reverse signs of darkening and prevent future pigmentation. A balanced combination of vitamin B3, yoghurt serum and conditioning moisturizers hydrate and even out skin tone. Triple sunscreens help prevent future darkening and encourage the skin to lighten itself.

A spokesman for Unilever, the parent company for the Vaseline brand, was not immediately available for comment.

I’m just gonna go hit my head against the wall a few times.

There’s not a whole lot I have to say about Police Women of Memphis as a show in general. I think that glorifying a very problematic justice system as this show seems to do is probably not fantastic. But, I like that it depicts ladies in positions of authority, being competent. It’s also cool that many of these women are of color. And one of the cops on the show is named “Virginia Awkward”, which is a pretty kickass name.

PWOM came to my atttention this weekend after I heard of its depiction of an almost radical act. It portrayed women as being worthy of respect, and protection. As not deserving of sexual harassment. This in itself would be worthy of praise. But this depiction is particularly worthy of singling out because the women being protected were trans women. And in a media environment that generally depicts trans women as deceptive, predatory, disgusting, and generally less than human, that’s exceptional.

This law is not about intrinsic respect for women. It’s not about liberating women. It’s not about creating a country that sees women as full, independent human beings.

This law is about limiting women’s religious expression. It’s about disrespecting what women want to wear. It’s about disregarding how full, independent human beings wish to express themselves, their marginalized background, their identity.

This ban is not about ensuring that women have “a social life”, not about keeping women from being “deprived of an identity” . This ban is about depriving women of their identity: their religion, their culture, their social interactions, their deeply held beliefs.

You should read also, whether the face veil is “a part of Islam or just culture” is COMPLETELY BESIDE THE POINT and oh for cripes first.

Deeply Problematic is hosting the next Disability Carnival! The theme this month is evidence.

Evidence can refer to having to prove one’s disability - to school, to friends, to writers, to society at large. It can refer to the expectation that people with disabilities must prove that ableism exists.

Evident and non-evident is a way to describe how disabilities appear to able-privileged folks. Anna introduced me to this term at Tumblr:

Yesterday I was talking to this awesome person named Stepha (and Jha!) who used the term “non-evident disability” and I’ve decided it is the best term ever and will be adopting it instead of “invisible”. As she said - as many people have said - so-called invisible disabilities really aren’t. They’re just not sign-posted with mobility aids or “obvious” differences.

Content warning.

Wendy Garland’s death is evidence of the danger in assuming that related caretakers have their family member’s best interest in mind. Able-privileged caretakers, particularly those who are kin to the person they care for, are given latitude where it’s not deserved. Their “sacrifices” earn them the benefit of the doubt, and someone else’s disability becomes their “burden”. Caregivers and family of PWD are often centralized in conversations about disability, and some shift those discussions to themselves. This is ableist. While family members and caretakers can be both critiqued and praised in disability discourse, the focus should always be on the person with disabilities.